In this video, recorded at the most recent TED conference, Elizabeth Gilbert, best-selling author of Eat, Pray, Love, muses on the nature of creativity. She suggests that it’s not a rare person that is a genius but rather that there is genius in all of us, waiting to be discovered. At 18 minutes, the video runs on the long side of what we tend to feature on the Octopz blog, but it’s worth every second of attention. If you’re in a real hurry, have a look at this 94 second excerpt from the talk.

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The latest episode of Byte Club TV, a show profiling tech companies, features Octopz. It includes interviews with our founders, CEO, marketing VP, developers as well as you humble blog editor, who reveals his social media planning secrets (hint: it involves toy soldiers).

Show notes below.

The creators of Octopz are award-winning content developers who have helped some of the world’s most recognizable brands compete successfully in the global business environment with innovative web-based product visualizations including interactive photographic and 3D imaging services.

Taking interactivity to a new level of performance, they created Octopz - a technology specifically designed for the iterative way creative professionals work. With support for an unprecedented range of document types, intuitive markup tools, and built-in text messaging, VoIP and webcam capabilities, Octopz enables team members to work securely, either together in real time or asynchronously, with Octopz automatically saving their work. Each session can be easily retrieved and reviewed by anyone they choose, at anytime, and from anywhere.

Of course, one of the reasons Octopz works so well for creative professionals is because, in addition to being software developers, the inventors of Octopz are also creative professionals with successful careers in photography and digital media. Their first-hand insight into the creative process informed every decision made during the software’s development.

This approach, coupled with input from users, now drives a continuous enhancement process. They listen to what user have to say about Octopz and make improvements based on their comments. As a result, Octopz will continue to become more functional, more powerful, and even easier to work with, thanks to feedback from you, the people who actually use it every day.

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Playing For Change is a both remarkable film and a global multimedia movement to connect the world through music.

The film, Playing for Change - Peace Through Music, is a documentary about music and its inherent ability to unite people. It began with a single recording of street performer Roger Ridley in Santa Monica, California singing “Stand By Me”. From there it snowballed into a year-long journey around the world by one of the directors, Mark Johnson, to record over 100 musicians at street corners, small clubs and homes in places like New Orleans, Moscow, South Africa, and Tibet, using small and portable sound and video equipment.

The critical acclaim and positive momentum of this and the directors’ first film (Playing for Change, released in 2003) led to the creation of Playing For Change Foundation. The Foundation provides support and resources to musicians and communities around the world by building music schools in places like South Africa, helping students to create and share their music and enabling collaboration between students of their schools and students from established schools around the world.

Playing For Change will release a CD and DVD of their music and videos in the spring of 2009. Some of the audio and video content is also available at their website playingforchange.com

Related Pond post: Jimmy Wales on internet collaboration and video

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Our most recent release of Octopz is now live and features new options for uploading and sharing video files. New features include:

• The ability to choose between streaming and download viewing modes
• Markup indicators on the video timeline, which correspond to the views in the Documents and Views list
• Support for the H264 video codec
• Support for FLV video in native format and quality settings

Other Octopz enhancements in this release include improved monitoring (with automatic resumption) of internet connections and new icons to indicate document/file types. Also, the minimum system requirements for Adobe Flash Player have been bumped to version 9.0.115.

To see Octopz in action, including the latest enhancements, sign up for your own free trial account or take an online tour.

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CNBC’s five part TV series on collaboration has concluded with a look at the future of collaboration. At the close of the show, host Donnie Deutsch asks one of his special guests, professor Richard Florida, to sum things up with a big takeaway on the future of collaboration.

In response, Florida offers up the 3 Ts (talent, technology and tolerance), from his best-selling book The Rise of the Creative Class, as key to effective collaboration. You can watch the full episode here or download it as a podcast through Apple’s iTunes Store.

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Earlier this month, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales spoke to AFP (Agence France-Presse) about the future of online collaboration over the internet. Wales thinks that we’re just at the beginning of online collaborative efforts and singled out video as a medium that has yet to be transformed by the dynamics of online collaboration and Web 2.0.

If you look at almost everything on YouTube, it’s individuals doing videos, either funny cat videos, or drunk girl videos seem to be quite popular there. What we haven’t seen yet in video is large-scale collaborative projects.

Wales offered up the example of a 90-minute video of people from all around the world being interviewed about Iraq being possible through online collaboration. And while acknowledging that the audience for such a video might be limited, Wales suggested that getting 100,000 people thinking about collaborative video production online could transform the way we make videos in the future, especially documentaries and factual programming.

The full interview with AFP is here

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In this TED video, New York Times technology columnist David Pogue uses humor and song to take aim at technological complexity in software and highlights some products that get simplicity right.

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More proof that collaboration is becoming a much higher priority for organizations: CNBC and BT (British Telecom) have teamed up to produce Collaboration Now, a five part TV show on collaboration in business.

Hosted by CNBC’s Donnie Deutsch, the show features a series of interviews with guests from big business the sciences, arts and academia. The first episode, entitled “Collaborate to Compete” aired on October 12 on CNBC and can also been seen in full on the show’s website.

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Canadian Business Online has published a Q&A interview with Octopz CEO Ron McKenzie (pictured above) on Web 2.0 and real-time collaboration. Ron responds to questions about market challenges and opportunities for Octopz, the benefit of our online collaboration service for companies and his thought on who else is doing innovative work in Canada. The whole interview is here.

On a related note, Ron will be speaking about Octopz and collaboration at an upcoming Web 2.0 Canadian Leadership Series Lunch & Learn in Toronto, on October 6, 2008. An information sheet with details and registration information is available here (pdf).

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